In a bonkers interview with CNN late Thursday, Environmental Protection Agency head Scott Pruitt doubled down on the climate censorship that’s become foundational to this administration’s environmental agenda. A longtime denier of man-made climate change, Pruitt told CNN it is “insensitive” to discuss the role climate change may have played in strengthening Hurricane Harvey or Hurricane Irma.

“Here’s the issue,” Pruitt told CNN in a phone interview. “To have any kind of focus on the cause and effect of the storm; versus helping people, or actually facing the effect of the storm, is misplaced.”

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“All I’m saying to you is, to use time and effort to address it at this point is very, very insensitive to this people in Florida.”

Pruitt’s finger-wagging attempts to turn global warming into a taboo may be softer than his boss’s assertion that climate change is a “hoax,” but they’re united in a policy of erasure and denial. This has nothing to do with Hurricane Irma or Hurricane Harvey. This is about enacting a relentless deregulation agenda and using any means necessary to silence detractors, even at the cost of ignoring what’s energizing these catastrophic storms.

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How do you prevent storms without understanding their causes? Even the most measured assessments of climate change’s impact on Harvey and Irma points to warming oceans and rising sea levels. In a report on the ambivalent data on climate change and Hurricane Harvey,climatologists told Gizmodo that, by even their most conservative estimates, Harvey was “more intense, bigger, and longer lasting” than it would’ve been without the effects of climate change.

What about that is insensitive? The lies only became more obvious as the Pruitt interview continued:

“What we need to focus on is access to clean water, addressing these areas of superfund activities that may cause an attack on water, these issues of access to fuel. ... Those are things so important to citizens of Florida right now, and to discuss the cause and effect of these storms, there’s the... place (and time) to do that, it’s not now.”

Pruitt has said that he wants the EPA to address superfund sites—heavily polluted areas that, if breached by floodwater, could carry contaminants all throughout the hurricane’s path. Just last week, AP reporters found that the EPA still hadn’t visited 11 superfund sites surrounding Houston, falsely claiming they were inaccessible. Instead of fast-tracking on-site visits, the EPA attacked the journalists for “cherry-picking facts,” without actually refuting the story itself. Who does that help?

Those most vulnerable to the effects of the storm are the people who live near chemical plants, landfills and waste treatment centers; overwhelmingly low-income people. The EPA has a dedicated department to understanding how social inequities exacerbate the effects of pollution and environmental harm. It’s called the Office of Environmental Justice and Trump’s administration proposed eliminating the program by zero-ing out its funding. Isn’t that insensitive?